


and I hope (we rise to the occasion)

by luninosity



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Aftermath, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Homecoming, Hope, Love, M/M, Miscarriage, Mpreg, Post Beach Divorce, Rebuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 12:17:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1266250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Cuba, Charles makes a discovery, loses everything, and is found at last. And Erik comes home to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. charles

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [[授权翻译]and I hope (we rise to the occasion)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10846293) by [Shame_i_translate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shame_i_translate/pseuds/Shame_i_translate)



> Time to start finishing all the unfinished fic...I've had bits of this one done for, oh, two years.
> 
> It's a fix-it, guys. Promise. 
> 
> Title, opening, and closing lines from Dead Sara’s “Dear Love.”

  
_won’t you lay_   
_down beside where I’ve been laying_   
_you change with the weather_   
_you change with the weather_   
_please stay…_

  
Charles finds out about the baby three days after its father—its other father—leaves. The doctors, in fact, find out much earlier; but Charles himself is unconscious and broken and lost in pain and then in drugs, and so even if they tell him he doesn’t remember.  
  
He does remember when the grey-haired calm-eyed physician who’s the lead on his case pulls a chair up the side of his bed and says, “Professor Xavier, we need to talk about your lab results,” and Charles says, “It’s Doctor Xavier for the moment, please, not a professor until I’ve got a teaching post,” and then has to stop as the thought hits like a bullet to the gut, and he ought to know about bullets.  
  
Of course he’d tried to be a teacher. To be a leader. Three days ago he’d been on a beach at the crumbling of the world.  
  
He shuts his eyes. The calm-voiced doctor sighs. “Sorry, Doctor Xavier.”  
  
Charles opens his eyes again. “No, it’s fine. Go on.”  
  
“We’ve told you about the extent of your injuries…you understand both what will be within your capacity—voluntary bodily functions intact and so on—and what won’t…” They both pause to glance at Charles’s useless legs, lumps beneath the blanket. Charles has been trying very hard not to overhear anything here in the hospital, a task made considerably easier by all the drugs that turn his brain to mushy porridge; but this one spikes loud and vivid, not pity but a kind of clear-cut clinical curiosity: _mutation, genetic sport, kid’s got the strangest luck I ever saw losing that but gaining—_  
  
“Oh dear _God_ ,” Charles sputters, out loud and utterly without thinking. “A _baby?”_  
  
The man’s gaze narrows. “How’d you—”  
  
“Oh fuck,” Charles says helplessly, and _pushes_ and _pulls_ , yanking all the information out of the man’s head while simultaneously sweeping clean any vaguest drifting notion of ever seeing a mutant in his life. He shouldn’t be able to do this, not drugged to within an inch of his life and not with his admittedly occasionally flexible moral scruples still tatteredly in place; but fuck that, he’s pregnant and he’s panicked, albeit in an extremely sharply defined brittle fashion, and the adrenaline’s kicking in.  
  
He yells telepathically for Hank, while he’s got the strength. Might as well.  
  
Hank comes sprinting in through the suddenly frozen hospital, past motionless doctors and nurses, wild-eyed and panting and shoeless, a minute later. “Charles—are you—”  
  
“We need to leave,” Charles says, and Hank opens his mouth to protest but one headshake cuts him off. “Now.”  
  
So they do. No one notices their departure.  
  
Charles, back at the mansion, wraps the house in mental barbed-wire booby-traps, quivering elegant strands designed to twinge and twist at any incursion, telepathic or physical. The wires will burrow into minds and make themselves at home; the pain will increase the closer anyone comes to the mansion. It’s very Sleeping Beauty, really.  
  
The vines will only incapacitate anyone who isn’t a friend, of course. He conscientiously trains the little vicious loops to recognize the peculiar textures and flavors of the privileged few. Himself. Sean’s emerald enthusiasm and swooping emotions, the kind of clumsy thoughtfulness that’s fast becoming more thoughtful and less clumsy. Hank, a brilliant tangle of tactlessness and black coffee and chewed-up pencil bits and microscope glass and self-doubt and determination. Alex, as incandescent as a brushfire, and as devoted. Moira, who won’t remember them but will be offered a safe haven should she ever require such. She’s thinking vaguely of leaving the CIA, of pursuing a career in the sciences, he notes. Not because she recalls him—he’s busy making certain of that—but because she has a genuine and vast desire to help people, and she’s uneasy where she is, in an agency in which, she suspects, the command has its own agenda.  
  
Charles smiles, and leaves her with that thought. Wishes her well.  
  
After a moment that feels like an eternity but isn’t, he weaves Raven into the small group allowed entry as well. She’s his sister. He pours that into his description. That’s everything.  
  
And then there’s one more. Erik.  
  
He almost doesn’t. He’s not certain he can.  
  
But his hand falls, almost of its own volition, to his stomach. Ridiculous, because he can’t feel anything yet, six weeks along and he’s not even showing and he hasn’t had morning sickness or any of the symptoms, but there it is anyway, his hand on his stomach and a new tiny life building itself inside him, sleeping there, snug and warm.  
  
Erik, Erik. Chess matches and the slow smooth burn of scotch and the crackle and spark of flint and stone, promise and wariness, anger and hope. Lean powerful muscles and cynicism and startling certain optimism: Erik never doubted his own ability to find the man he’d known as Schmidt, never doubted his own love for Charles, never doubted that they could change the world together. Erik’s a rock on these points. Erik also always argued, then, for the ends justifying the means. For the goal above all else. For sacrifices that would have to be made. And if one of those sacrifices was Charles’s love—  
  
Erik had never, in Erik’s head, deserved that anyway. Erik believed—still believes, as far as Charles knows—that Frankenstein’s monster was too warped, too scarred, too far gone into destruction to know how to love without pain. Charles, in Erik’s head, is a shining white knight, all glorious and kind and beautiful and stupidly naïve and brilliantly impassioned and idiotically ready to dive into the ocean after a man he’d never met, and Erik loves him so much that Erik has to kill for him and leave him and reshape the world for him, so that maybe someday the world will be what Charles wants it to be, if Erik can make it so with blood and thunder…  
  
Erik has always been wrong about him. Erik would never be convinced otherwise. Charles himself could, thinking about it now, have stood up and shouted back, _I listened to my father kill himself and I made my stepbrother into a happy football-playing moron because I couldn’t take him throwing one more book of mine in a fire and I have a scar on my hip that you’ve never asked about because you didn’t think you had the right even while your thoughts were so unhappy, wanting to know all of me, and you thought it was selfish and I’d’ve told you but I couldn’t find words and in between then and the next breath you kissed me as if you could learn all of me that way and cling to only as much as you’d been already given…_  
  
He’d never had the chance to find those words. He’s never told anyone. He would’ve told Erik. He can’t, today.  
  
Erik’s not here. That’s a certainty as well.  
  
He takes a deep breath, and laces all those memories into his defensive walls. They’ll be recognized.  
  
The vines curl and rustle, restless; but they settle as he strokes them, soothing. They have a job to do; they’ll guard the mansion even when he’s asleep or unconscious. He doesn’t need to be watching to feel any tug at the web.  
  
He opens his eyes. And then promptly throws up on Hank’s feet, in the mansion infirmary. Mostly from exhaustion and the hideous headsplitting migraine. Ninety percent that, anyway.  
  
“I’m so sorry.”  
  
“Don’t.” Hank has obviously been crouched beside him, watching worriedly. “I mean don’t apologize. I can shower. Charles, you—this isn’t a symptom of—can you tell me what—”  
  
“I’m pregnant,” Charles says, and then starts laughing at the shellshocked expression on Hank’s face, and then starts crying, because he’s pregnant, and Erik, _Erik_.  
  
Hank’s expression shifts into flailing concern. “You—here, blanket—um, you must be sure, or you wouldn’t say—oh, God, Charles, is that your headache I’m feeling, that can’t be good for the baby—”  
  
“Sorry, sorry…here, I can fix it…better? Sorry…and pregnant, I’m sorry and I’m pregnant, oh good God, I can’t have _tea_ …”  
  
“What the hell,” Hank says, “I mean, obviously, er, you, er, but _how?”_ and Charles shakes his head through all the tears and says, “It just sort of happened, Hank, I didn’t plan on this,” and Hank blinks, obviously calculating, and then says, _“Lehnsherr,”_ and it’s an actual growl, rumbling and ferocious. They both blink, astonished.  
  
“Um,” Hank says, “sorry, Professor,” and Charles shakes his head but he’s laughing again, and thank God, thank God for Hank, who simply puts a terrifiedly cautious arm around him and starts thinking very loudly about the fascinating scientific implications of this development, in enough technical detail that Charles forgets to think _Erik_ and ends up drawn in to discussions of RNA and protein bonding.  
  
Hank orders sonogram equipment. Charles, getting used to the wheelchair because not doing so is even more unthinkable, invokes pregnant-person privilege and gets to play with the new equipment first, testing it on Hank, who rolls his eyes.  
  
The baby’s essentially the size of a lentil at this point, but he can’t help the breathlessness, seeing it for the first time. He can’t say anything. Hank says, softly, “Gosh,” and Charles, very slowly, grins.  
  
The expression hurts, like ice cracking after a long winter; but it’s a good hurt, inside.  
  
Hank swallows, and says, with the tone of a man venturing out on a fraying rope bridge over an alligator-filled ravine, “Are you going to…do you want him to…should we tell him?”  
  
The alligators churn the water and thrash their tails, sharp-toothed and implacable. Charles says, “No.”  
  
He _should_ tell Erik. Erik deserves to know. And if he does tell Erik, then Erik might come home.

He lets himself imagine that, briefly, for a second. Erik. Back home.  
  
But he doesn’t want Erik to come back because it’s an obligation, or out of guilt. And if Erik returns because of this, then he won’t have returned because of Charles, and that fact will always be true.  
  
Worse, Erik might not come back at all. Might listen, if Charles reaches out, and then say no. Or not answer at all.  
  
The absence, in his head, that blank spot where his other half used to echo with sensation, is tangible. It always is. Like an amputated limb. Like his legs.  
  
So he can’t tell Erik. He can do this alone.  
  
Hank says, worry like the weight of the world in his voice, “Professor?” and Charles shuts his eyes and says, “Yes, I’m here, sorry, I’m fine.” Later he’ll want to cry, or laugh, and he’ll end up doing both, because what the _fuck_ , honestly. He’s lost his legs. But there’s life inside him. He’s lost Erik. But he and Erik have a child.  
  
Good God. He’s going to be a _father_. Or something like that, at least. That part’s finally sinking in. Not just the pregnancy. The after.  
  
It’s not a bad thought, when he contemplates that idea. Kind of warm. Surprisingly so. Maybe, just maybe, this is something he can do. He might not be able to save the world or keep Erik at his side or protect his students, but he can carry this new life, this piece of himself and Erik, and protect it, at least.  
  
Of course that doesn’t prove to be the case. Of course he should really have known better.  
  
At first everyone and everything radiates excitement, upon hearing the news. Hank, once he realizes that Charles is actually rather looking forward to the idea, starts going into giddy detail about infant development and nursery requirements and starts purchasing every baby book available to read up on the process. Charles points out that this particular process is going to be quite different from anything anyone’s ever done before, and Hank nods and orders three more cases of prenatal vitamins.  
  
Sean stares for a while, when he’s told about the baby; says, wide-eyed, “Did you _know_ you could do that?” and Charles laughs until he cries.  
  
“No! I can promise you, Sean, this particular possibility never even occurred to me! I can assure you, if it had, we would’ve been much more cautious—”  
  
“Oh, god,” Sean says, “no mental images, please, and you’re not going to ask me to help feed it or anything, are you, because if it throws up on me I might accidentally rupture its eardrums or something—”  
  
“You will not,” Charles retorts through the laughter, “and in fact I was thinking of asking you—and Hank, as well—to be, er, godparents. Or something similar. If you’d like, of course.”  
  
“Oh, wow,” Sean says, “oh, wow, yeah, totally, I mean yes, of course, if you want us to, but I’m not—”  
  
“I trust you,” Charles tells him, and he can read those thoughts on Sean’s face, then, not even needing to pop into that so-open mind: Sean is rather touchingly honored, and determined to be adult enough for this responsibility—which makes Charles kind of want to laugh again; as if he, himself, is all that responsible—and he’s thinking, also, about the person who _isn’t_ there, and resolving never to mention that name, not ever, but to try to be whatever Charles needs him to be, as much as he can. Even though he knows he’s never going to be _that_ person. The one Charles does need.  
  
Not all needs have to be fulfilled. Charles tells himself this fact every morning. Some days he almost believes it can be true.  
  
In the end, it only takes another five weeks for the universe to implode.  
  
It’s a Sunday, which means he’s being perfectly lazy, having woken up late and with nothing, for once, pressing to do. He could be doing things, of course—he could certainly be writing an article about this newly-presented genetic mutation, for example—but he doesn’t feel productive, at the moment. More sluggish. Tired, even though he’s just gotten up.  
  
In fact, he’s been tired for a few days, a sort of bone-deep exhaustion that leaves him feeling achy, weightless, irritable, and worrisomely weak. He hasn’t wanted to say anything; he’s still functional, after all, and it’s not as if this is a normal situation in any regard. For all he knows, this sensation of hollow fragility is entirely normal during pregnancy. During male pregnancy. During mutant pregnancy. Good lord.  
  
The mansion is quiet; he can hear, if he tries, Hank in the lab, contemplating data on potential future school residents, and Sean working out curriculum ideas and lesson planning and wondering whether it’s too early for beer, in the kitchen. Charles grins, and then stops listening, because he has a bit of a headache.  
  
The sunlight, previously golden and reassuring, pops behind a cloud. This is _not_ so reassuring. Obnoxious weather. All pompous and portentous.  
  
He tries to focus on his book. He _likes_ Heinlein. And this is a new one, and he’s been waiting eagerly to plunge into it. But at the moment he seems to be capable of reading an entire page and instantly forgetting every single word upon it.  
  
The wheelchair abruptly feels terribly uncomfortable. Not that it’s friendly at the best of times, but right now, at this moment, something’s too hard, or too inflexible, making his back ache in places where the bruises have barely begun to fade.  
  
Funny, he thinks, that shouldn’t hurt that much, not this soon in the day, I’ve only just got into the fucking chair, and then something twists inside his stomach, and the pain isn’t in his back or anywhere else anymore, it’s _there_.  
  
He just has time to think, oh, that’s wrong, it must be, and then the _rest_ of the pain hits, like nothing he’s ever felt before, and he feels a snap like the breaking of a neck, like the ending of all life, and he knows what’s just happened, and he starts to scream.  
  
There’s blood, then. And shaking hands and attempts at surgery, desperate efforts to open him up and save them both even though he’s trying to explain that no rescue can ever happen, that he knows this in a space beyond certainty; but he can’t be coherent, not through the tangle of agony and desolation and anesthesia that doesn’t work. That he can’t allow to work because then he’ll forget what this torture feels like, and he needs to feel it, because he deserves it all, and worse.  
  
There’s a cold operating table under him and Hank’s voice alternately shouting and coaxing and fading to a dull buzz. The air tastes metallic. Coppery. Like blood, except it’s not a simile. The taste isn’t _like_ blood.  
  
He’s very tired, all at once. Strangely lighter. He fights that feeling for a while—he can’t go, he can’t give up, where’s the pain gone, the pain that he deserves to be drowned in for this last failure of all—but he really is awfully worn down with all of this and maybe this is okay, maybe the universe won’t mind if he steps away for just a moment, it doesn’t need him anyway and then Hank can stop shouting…  
  
Gradually, the physical world turns grey. That’s okay too. Those sensations don’t matter, not any more. All that matters is his own inadequacy, and the consequent devastation, and eternal inescapable emptiness.  
  
Infinity, when he lets himself fall outward into it, is black. There’s nothing out there but the searing barren void. Nothing to hold on to. Nothing to come back for. It’s peaceful at first. Welcoming. Serene.  
  
But he doesn’t deserve peace.  
  
But when he tries to reach back behind him—as if there’s a behind him, as if there’s any physicality or dimensionality or reality here—there’s also nothing there. All lifelines severed. No tether left for the reeling-in. At first he’s too shocked to be surprised, and then he’s surprised, and then he’s unsurprised. It’d been what he’d wanted, after all. The emptiness. And it is.  
  
When he screams again, it’s only in his head. But the sound echoes through the universe regardless.  
  
And the universe, broken and voiceless, screams too.


	2. erik

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for trusting me, you guys! *hugs* Now it will get better...

The mansion is soundless when Erik arrives. Like a winter evening intruding itself unnaturally into summer, shrouded by the blank whiteness of snow. Like hopelessness. Like a tomb.  
  
The newly-formed group, not even a name yet, only the ones who’d come with him or come to find him, had been sitting in an decommissioned old army base, something out of use since the nineteen-forties and full of glooming dust-bunnies; had been sitting on crates and broken chairs and waiting and trying to plan. Erik’s always been good at strategy, at moving relentlessly toward a goal. In the dim metallic antique military light, he ought to’ve felt at home. He hadn’t. Couldn’t.  
  
They’d needed him to be a leader. Emma Frost and Raven and Angel and Azazel and Janos and the others who’d come when Emma’d called. They’d been waiting. Expecting.  
  
Every time he’d closed his eyes he’d seen sparkling blue and laughter and hope. Himself getting Sean to fly. Hank’s delight at outrunning Charles, in that moment unashamed. Charles—  
  
Charles.  
  
He’d left Charles bleeding on a beach, had left because Charles had told him to— _but he didn’t_ , snickers a small insistent voice in the back of his head, _he said you didn’t want the same things but you knew that, you know that, he never said he didn’t love you,_ and Erik persistently does not listen to that voice because he _can’t_ —and he’d been moving on autopilot after, instinct simply to seek shelter and become strong again on his own. He needs to be strong. He’s always needed to be strong. If he isn’t, people die. If he isn’t, people he loves always die.  
  
The air hangs still and heavy with the tang of blood, if he lets himself sense it. He tries not to. But it’s a horrifically familiar taste.  
  
They’d not been hungry, his group—and when were they his, when had he ever wanted that responsibility, he was no mentor or professor or oh G-d _Charles_ —  
  
—they’d had _food_ , he’d managed that at least, and they’d been preoccupied the first few weeks with fortifications and defenses and preparations. He’d been glad that no one’d asked: preparations for what?  
  
He believes in the beauty of what they are, what they can do. He believes that the world will need to change. And he can’t see himself fighting Charles.  
  
More accurately, he can see it. He _has_. And he’s left Charles bleeding and paralyzed—Emma Frost had found the hospital, though she said it’d been odd, as if the memories and diagnosis were disappearing even as she tried to ferret them out. Charles taking precautions, she’d guessed. Erik approves—Charles has learned caution—and wants to scream and rage and break the world in two. Charles has learned caution. Because of him. Charles is paralyzed. Because of him.  
  
All those memories are tinged with red now, and there’ll be no going back, if there were bridges he burned them the second he put on the helmet, and they’re scattered in ashes at the bottom of the ravine. It doesn’t matter that his heart’s down there too. He can take all the pain, if that’s what’s necessary.  
  
Deep down he’s not sure he made the right choice. Deep down he wants to go back to that moment and change everything. He wants to know whether Charles feels the same, whether Charles ever wakes up in the morning and tries to roll over into the shyly delighted brand-new warmth of the person beside him, and then remembers.  
  
He’s not taken off the helmet even to sleep. He doesn’t know what he’d do if Charles tries to speak to him. He doesn’t know what he might do if Charles doesn’t. At least with the metal in place the uncertainty is certain: he never has to _know_ that Charles thinks him irredeemable, hateful, disgusting.  
  
He’s taken it off to shower, briefly. Never without ordering Emma to keep telepathic watch. She hasn’t mentioned any incursions. He thinks she would. He thinks that Charles hasn’t tried. And the ashes drift along the ravine floor in silence.  
  
Broken bridges, and the turning of the world. And he’s back at the mansion, where he’d never believed he’d be. He’s back because Emma Frost had sat bolt upright in her chair and said, “Erik, get back there, _now_ ,” and he’d glared and demanded, “Explain,” and Emma had shaken her head and told him to go.  
  
She’d been afraid. She’d said Charles’s name, and been afraid. Emma Frost, pale and shaken. He’d’ve never known, beneath the helmet, if she hadn’t picked up the flare of pain and explosion of void.  
  
Charles needs him. Needs help, at least, if not from him specifically. And Erik would like to say he’ll always be there when Charles needs help, and he can’t—that beach, salt and sand and red everywhere, clouding the sea and sky and pouring from Charles’s suit at the back, pouring like an apocalypse over Erik’s hand—but he _can_ try to always be there in need if always can be counted from now on, and it’ll never make up for that one but surely enough times will count for something, and all he needs is for Charles to smile at him, one smile he can keep next to his heart like a folded love-letter worn-out with hopeless reading—  
  
The mansion is soundless. There are bodies strewn in awkward places: in the front hallway, in the case of Sean. Erik doesn’t trip over him because Erik is good at observing his surroundings, but does pause to check his pulse. Alive. Breathing. Good enough. The world’s a fairy-tale, a story Erik distantly recalls, painted in grim shadows. A wall of briars. A castle filled with eerie enchanted sleepers. A princess under a curse.  
  
Charles might’ve taken offense at being called a princess, or might’ve laughed and ordered Erik to pleasure him by royal decree. Charles can’t or won’t do either, now.  
  
Erik’s never minded silence, but this soundlessness is wrong. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, and along his arms.  
  
Azazel’s gone. Vanished, at Erik’s nod, a second after dropping them both in. He’d’ve tried to stay, but literally couldn’t. Whatever wall of thorns Charles has set up, it’s designed to keep visitors out, decidedly so. Erik’s not sure what it means, that he’s allowed.  
  
Raven had wanted to come. Had tried; the walls might’ve even let her in. But the _air_ is sick. Every breath feels like drowning. The immutability of anguish pushes down forcefully, and even with the helmet as a shield Erik can scarcely take a step. He’d sent Raven back before she could be pulled under.  
  
The gloom drags at everything like quicksand.  
  
He makes himself run, though. He needs to be stronger than the greyness. He needs to outpace the insidious whispers, the almost-visible miasma of defeat, surrender, bleakness, and the murmurs that, sleekly persuasive, tell him to sink down in place, just inside the open front doorway, or halfway down the hall, and stop trying.  
  
He can still make himself fight back against those dreamlike and vicious suggestions. Even though they speak in a voice he knows too well.  
  
But he’s here to hear that voice. To find Charles.  
  
So he does.  
  
Charles isn’t in the infirmary. Erik means to check there first, but even through the dull protective shielding of the helmet he can tell that the heaviest shroud of silence isn’t lurking in that direction. So he follows the pain, instead. The more it throbs in his bones, the closer he is to where he needs to be.  
  
Charles is in his bedroom—his new ground-floor bedroom, because Charles is _paralyzed_ , and oh those ashes can still burn in Erik’s chest—curled into the middle of his enormous bed, pillows scattered around the floor like desolate fallen leaves, and he doesn’t react when Erik enters the room, and he doesn’t open his eyes when Erik sits down carefully next to him, and he doesn’t move when Erik touches his hand.  
  
His fingers are cold.  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, voice not steady, “can you hear me?”  
  
No answer.  
  
“Charles, it’s me. It’s Erik. Can you wake up?”  
  
Still no answer, and Charles’s hand doesn’t move in his. Erik touches him, gently, tries to shake him, as if that might help; and then catches sight of redness against the blue of the sheets, on Charles’s fluffy blue cardigan.  
  
He tugs Charles onto his back, and stops, shock running through his veins like iron. Blood. So much blood. He pulls up that inadequate jumper and sees the bandages, running in a long and terrible line along the pale skin of Charles’s stomach. He’d had surgery, then, Erik thinks distantly. Someone had been there, had tried to help. But Charles is bleeding again and the warmth of it spills through the inadequate, no longer white, fabric. And no one is there to help this time.  
  
“Charles,” he says,” hold on, please, hold on,” and he runs, out of the bedroom, back to the infirmary, back into the bedroom, on legs that only work because he tells them to.  
  
His hands don’t shake as he replaces bandages, as he peels away bloodied cloth and presses layers of firm new cotton against the brutal stitches that carve black and red lines across white skin. But that’s just because his hands, after years of inflicting and repairing wounds during his hunt for Shaw, move on autopilot at this point. Inside he’s terrified in a way that he has never, ever, known.  
  
He’s finished with the bandages, and Charles still hasn’t moved or spoken except for a few probably involuntary flinches during the process. Erik whispers, “I’m sorry,” each time anyway, and gets no response.  
  
He takes a deep breath, and holds cold hands in his, and pulls off the helmet.  
  
The pain hits him first, great billowing waves of agony, physical and, worse, not. Then the utter emptiness of overwhelming loss. Then the guilt, inarguable and infinite in scope. Then the rage, which is not directed at him, Erik, in any way, even if, he thinks, it should be: this whole situation is, after all, partly his fault.  
  
This situation—not only the injury, no, something—  
  
 _…a child—?!_ The thought’s no doubt too loud, echoing shock through the universe. Charles doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t react in the slightest.  
  
A child. G-d. Charles is—they’re—  
  
No. They _were_. Charles _was_.  
  
Oh. Oh G-d. No. All of those unformed thoughts— _a father I could be a father we could do this what do I know about and maybe I could teach him Mama’s recipes and candlelight and maybe she’d have blue eyes and Charles’s smile and grow up in a safer world and where do we even begin and yes_ —all dissolve and pop like soap-bubbles, unrecapturable. Fleeting. Gone.  
  
Erik, physically, puts a hand over his mouth. Shaking.  
  
After a second he reaches out and collects Charles’s fingers into his, with the other hand.  
  
He doesn’t need to ask why Charles wouldn’t tell him. He knows.  
  
But Charles isn’t angry with him. Charles is angry with himself, with his own body for betraying him, with his inability to be strong enough, with what he thinks of as some sort of failure. Self-loathing runs laced through every other emotion, as bitter as arsenic and as strong.  
  
The weight of this is crushing, paralyzing, flattening. No wonder every other person in the mansion is near-catatonic, and that’s only at second-hand.  
  
But these are emotions that Erik knows all too well. Self-loathing, pain, rage—they’re old friends. They are not comfortable, and they beat against his mind with unrelenting power, but they are familiar. He uses that familiarity as a flimsy shield and shouts _Charles!_ into the void.  
  
He’s being ignored, or maybe just not heard. The empty despair echoes around him like a collapsing star. Light falls inward and vanishes into pain.  
  
 _Charles_ , he calls out, desperately. _I’m here. I’m here with you. You aren’t alone_.  
  
There’s a little flicker of brightness that pauses to look at him then. A crack in the void, stopping briefly to pay attention.  
  
 _Charles, it’s me. It’s Erik. I’m here. I love you_ . He tries to project, everything he can think of, everything that might display the truth of that statement. Emotions. Memories. A satellite, moving. The two of them in a field beneath summer sunlight and the taste of sugar and pineapple. The heat of nights in bed, blue silk sheets and flushed skin. The first time they’d met, the pull of depthless ocean water and the unquestionable knowledge that neither of them would have to be alone, ever again. Chessboards and laughter, passionate arguments and the gleam of light off the rim of an abandoned martini glass. Charles at his desk, looking up from a note-covered paper, smile sudden and bright.  
  
He doesn’t hide the memories of the beach, of Cuba. Those are part of them now, too, and he can’t lie to Charles, not here. What he does say is, simply, one more time, _I’m here now. I love you_.  
  
Charles looks at him for a minute, silently. _Erik_.  
  
 _Yes!_ Maybe it was enough. At least Charles can recognize him. That has to mean something.  
  
 _Erik?_  
  
 _Yes?_  
  
 _Why are you here?_  
  
 _I’m here because I love you!_ Erik shouts.  
  
 _Don’t,_ Charles says. _I’m not worth it. I’ve broken everything, you see_. Little bits of memories flash by, mirrored counterpart to Erik’s own offering. He sees himself, choosing to leave Charles on the beach. He sees Raven, walking away. He catches a glimpse of a boy he doesn’t know, tall and full of ugly laughter and heavy hands, and a book in the fire and a bruise on an arm and a flare of anger that _changes_ a mind. He feels the newborn unformed life that might have been, a piece of himself and a piece of Charles, and then feels all that potentiality wink out into nothingness. _You see_. It isn’t a question.  
  
 _No! No. Charles, I love you, and you are wrong about this, about yourself, I promise you_ . Words might be one of Charles’s strengths, but Erik has his certainty, and he infuses every syllable with it. _You mend the world. You’ve always tried. You saved me. Even me. And you are wrong if you think otherwise._  
  
Charles actually laughs. It’s harsh and unamused. _No one except you ever says that to me._  
  
 _Charles, please listen. Not everything is broken. We, you and I, are not broken. Or if we are we can be put back together. And I am here. I will be here. I will come home if you want me to. And I love you._  
  
 _Why?_ The despair in that single word shakes both of them to the core. _You shouldn’t_.  
  
 _Charles_ , Erik whispers, _I will fight to save you with every last breath. With every last thought. And if I cannot save you then I will die at your side, because I would rather go with you than let you go alone_. Every single word is a vow.  
  
After a minute, after a lifetime, Charles says, almost absently, _I don’t want you to die._  
  
 _Then live._  
  
 _You said you’d come home, if I wanted you to._  
  
 _I will._  
  
 _I don’t want you to come because I want you to. I want you to come because you want to. I don’t—I don’t have anything left here, to come back to._ The world feels so cold. So brutally cold, around him. He knows that that’s because Charles believes it to be.  
  
 _Charles_ , he says, simply, truthfully, _I’ve never not wanted to come home_.  
  
After a second, reluctantly, but equally true: _I’ve never not wanted you here beside me_.  
  
And so the decision’s already made. That one, at least. He doesn’t know whether it’ll be enough. But the darkness around them perhaps isn’t quite as frozen.  
  
He says, one more repetition of the promise, binding ritual incantation for the magic spell, _I love you_.  
  
He can feel the shift in Charles’s attention at that. Those thoughts are focusing in around him, distracted just a hairsbreadth from the brink of the cataclysm.  
  
He offers, wordlessly this time, absolute emphasis. He means it. He does mean it. With everything he is and has been and might be. All the memories Charles has ever given back to him. All the memories they might still build together.  
  
Because they can still build, together. He’d thought, after Cuba, that they couldn’t possibly want the same things. Not any of the same things, whether that meant the future or just each other’s touch, one more time. But that’s wrong. He knows it is.  
  
They’ve always wanted the same things. A better world. A better future. Safety. Protection for those who need it.  
  
Each other.  
  
Everything else, all the arguments about means and methods and justifications, those are details. They can have those arguments again. They _should_ have those arguments again. Because they need to. Because they both have to be there to _make_ those arguments. Because those arguments would be forever one-sided, otherwise, after all.  
  
 _Charles_ , he whispers, _we can try again._  
  
 _It won’t ever be the same._  
  
 _No. It won’t. It’ll be something new._  
  
 _And you want that._  
  
 _Yes_ , Erik says simply. _I do_.  
  
The words spark fire, in the dark.  
  
And Charles nods, not a real nod, of course, because they don’t have bodies, not here. But it feels like agreement regardless. Like something that lives, green and tentative, next door to hope. _So do I._  
  
 _Then—_  
  
 _I want to—I want to WANT to try again. I want you. And I believe you. But I’m very tired._  
  
 _Charles, no!_  
  
 _I love you. I do. I just don’t think I can—I can see all that pain, from here. It’s waiting and I can’t—I don’t think I have anything left, anymore. I’m sorry._  
  
 _Don’t,_ Erik whispers into the creeping ice, when it closes in around the valiant little glimmers that are the two of them, tiny against the void. _Don’t give up. You never give up. Not you. You believe in the world. You believe in people. You believe in me—you believe me, when I tell you I love you. You do believe me?_  
  
 _Of course I do._  
  
 _Believe me now, then. Please. You can be strong enough for this. I know you can. And if you need strength from me, as well, you can take it. You can have anything you need, from me. Forever._  
  
 _You—_  
  
 _Because I want you to._  
  
A pause. Immanent, breathless, filled with tremors like the gathering of a storm. They don’t have bodies, only their own projections, but Erik imagines the hairs along his arm prickling upwards regardless. The anticipation crackles in the dark.  
  
And Charles says, _We can try again._  
  
 _I love you!_ Erik shouts.  
  
 _This will hurt_ , Charles answers.  
  
 _I don’t care—you’re worth it, I’m not going anywhere, we’ll fight and we’ll heal and we’ll stitch up each other’s wounds, I’ll be here and you’ll be here and—_  
  
Charles very nearly laughs. _Yes. That as well. I meant this. Getting back…_  
  
 _What do you need?_  
  
 _Stay still, I think…you’re our anchorpoint, I can’t see me but I can see you and it’ll help if you don’t move—sorry about this, sorry, I wish I could—_  
  
 _Just do whatever you need to do._  
  
 _So certain._  
  
 _Aren’t you?_  
  
 _I love you,_ Charles whispers, and then the universe twists and crashes into his brain, as if infinity’s trying to climb out into the world by means of Erik’s head; Charles is there and shielding him but Charles is worn thin and needs the ladder to climb, and Erik’s a ladder and an anchor and also the ship being tugged by the tide out to sea, lost in the dark, except Charles says very sharply _no, you’re coming back too, here, look at me,_ and Erik does even though neither of them has eyes and anyway they’re inside a spinning kaleidoscope…  
  
He opens his eyes, very very slowly. The eyelids creak as if unused for a hundred years. He half expects to shed dust when he moves. He also wants to throw up. The colors are all too intense. His senses throb.  
  
And none of that matters, because red-rimmed blue eyes are opening too, sapphires in raw velvet, and Charles is looking at him.  
  
He’s still holding Charles’s hand. He starts to speak. Stops. Realizes he’s crying, in part from the flood of searing sensation and in part because one of those sensations is Charles’s fingers curled around his, and another is Charles’s presence resting in a corner of his mind, tired but steady, knitted wool and sweet tea and kitten-quick delight radiating out to fill up all the lonely places with weary joy.  
  
Charles is crying as well, all bloodied clothing and bandages and too much exhaustion to move even an inch, and Erik sits there on the floor by the bed where his legs’ve given out, helmet absentmindedly crumpled into a useless lump of metal that he’ll shred into nonexistence whenever he’s got the energy for that, and clings to that hand in his.  
  
Quite shortly other people will be running in. He can hear them waking up, all across the mansion; can feel the jangle and panic of metal in motion. There will be questions. Explanations demanded. Trust that won’t come easily or fast. He’ll have to inform Raven, and Emma, and the rest. They can choose for themselves. He’s made his choice.  
  
His choice manages a smile, battle-scarred and beautiful and brave. Erik wants to kiss him. Would, if his wobbly limbs might allow him to get up.  
  
 _Anyone who wants to stay_ , Charles breathes. _They’re welcome. As long as they’re no threat to the students, of course. Then we’ll have to deal with them._  
  
 _Of course. We can. I love you._  
  
 _I love you. Erik, I was so close to—if you hadn’t—_  
  
 _I know. It’s all right._ It isn’t, not yet, but it will be. There’re things they need to talk about. Apologies to be made and accepted and worked for and earned. Stories to be shared—that boy in Charles’s memories, a stepbrother, Erik thinks, though he’s not certain why he knows that; but Charles knows, so now Erik does too—and comprehended. It won’t be easy. But it won’t be impossible.  
  
After all, they’re _both_ certain about this. Impossible doesn’t stand a chance.  
  
He tries not to have that other thought, but it floats at the forefront of his mind despite all efforts.  
  
“I don’t know,” Charles says, and glances at his stomach, at the bandages, as well. _I think…yes, we can. Hank believes it should be possible. To try again. Ow._  
  
“To try again…Charles—” They’re not trying _anything_ until some wounds have healed, and not only the physical. But then…maybe, maybe. Himself and Charles. Being parents. The image hurts, and cleanses. Annealing. Possibilities. They have possibilities together. _What hurts?_  
  
“Everything, but I meant my head, I should probably not try peeking into anyone else’s beliefs at the moment.” _Come up here?_  
  
“Yes,” Erik says, “yes,” and finds a last spurt of strength because Charles is asking and hauls himself off the floor and onto the bed and stretches out very carefully beside blue eyes. Charles’s toes brush his ankle. Erik touches a freckled cheek, extremely gently. Charles smiles.  
  
“Do you want me to,” Erik says, and Charles says “Yes,” and Erik finishes, _kiss you?_ and Charles whispers _yes_ , clear and wholehearted and true. So Erik kisses him, lips warm when they meet, and they’re still kissing when Hank and Sean and Alex and Emma Frost and Raven and Azazel burst into the room.

 

  
_lay down beside_   
_my ever-shaking body_   
_depends on the weather_   
_depends on the weather_   
_just stay…_


End file.
